CSCE 496/896

Game Day 4: Negotiation Day

November 26 2002

Introduction

On Negotiation Day, students are required to participate in various rounds of negotiations. Students are divided in to groups and each group’s goal is to perform negotiations. The key is to be able to make use of information during the negotiation process to reach a deal. The objectives of Negotiation Day are to learn and familiarize with the various negotiation protocols, and to learn how to observe the environment (e.g., the behavior of other agents) to support own decision making process.

Setup

First of all, for our Negotiation Day, we focus on various mechanisms for negotiations discussed in our Advanced Topic lectures. For this particular game day, we will have two stages. Stage one is based in a market place, stage two is hostage rescue.

Now, for the Market Place stage, each group is a provider of one unique product. Every group starts with the same amount of money. Suppose the number of student groups is N. Every group is required to have in possession one item of N unique products in the market. Each group starts with 2N items of its own product, and 0 items of other products.

I am the Market Monitor. I will announce the starting price of each product.

There are two phases for the Market Place stage.

For the first phase, the offers and responses are written and private. An offer should contain the name of the product, the number of items, and the price that you want to pay for it. A response should contain “agreed”, or “higher”, and “swap <#your product> <#my product>”. The prices will not be announced, they are private knowledge between the two sides of a successful transaction/deal. Once a deal is struck, I will instruct the provider to turn over the product to the buyer. Reneging on a deal results in an immediate expulsion from the market place! At the start of each round, each group submits their offers and counter-offers to me. I will then relay the offers to the corresponding counterparts and obtain in return their responses. And then I will act on the transactions.

For the second phase, each group is allowed to communicate directly with all other groups. You can even split up your group so you may conduct multiple concurrent negotiations together. But now, you need to better manage coordinate your activities within your group—remember, any backing out of an agreed deal results in an immediate expulsion from the market place. You will carry out the transactions yourself. To prevent chaos, I will call a time out after every 5 minutes of negotiations. The time out will last for 1 minute where everybody can regroup before continuing.

Each group’s goal is to obtain all N unique products and obtain as much money as possible, and as quickly as possible. Once you have obtained all N unique products, please yell out “BINGO!” Then you may continue with other negotiations to obtain more money.

Note that one strategy maybe to sell your own product above the market price since you have the monopoly. But, remember that by setting your price high, you may not be able to buy from other groups since they do not support your monopoly. There are many strategies that you could think of before the game day. Discuss them with your group-mates to make sure that you guys are coherent and have an overall, strategic game plan.

Note also that the in the first phase, each group has an incomplete information of the world. You will not know the exact prices of other groups’ transactions. You know only yours. But in the second phase, you can actually have one group member acting as a spy/scout to observe other groups’ transactions. So, you will be able to collect complete information, at least one product at a time. But you have to think carefully whether this is actually helpful or hindering.

Remember, if you agree to sell something and you suddenly realize that you have oversold, then you have violated the rules of the market place. Your customer then can immediately yell out “STOP!” to halt the activities. I will then expel you from the market, and the unique products that you have will be distributed evenly among the remaining groups, and the products you have procured will be turned over to me. So, be very careful. I also urge every customer group to be vigilant! That’s how you can eliminate rivals in the market place.

You may draw your negotiation tactics, issues, strategies from (Faratin et al. 1998).

During the second stage, the Hostage Rescue stage, the student groups will be paired up. For each pair, one group will be the kidnappers, and the other group will be the police. Both groups should use the Automated Negotiation Agent (ANA)’s six argument types in the negotiation (Kraus et al. 1998). This is simply a practice of using the six argument types. Be creative. Be imaginative. I will be the monitor of the negotiation and see whether you deviate from the six argument types, and to see whether you use all six types. Note that the role of each group (kidnappers or police) will be decided by a coin toss.

Requirements

Each student group is required to turn in a game day report (worksheets). In the report, you must describe your strategies for each round of negotiation, and more importantly, the pre-game strategy planning: what your group has agreed to do before the Negotiation Day. For the Market Place stage, Phase I, for each round, your group must describe why you set a certain price, why you want to swap, why you agree, why you do not, and so on. For the Market Place stage, Phase II, since it will be chaotic, you do not have to report round-by-round results. However, each group member must document her/his own strategy in carrying the negotiations, overall planning, task distribution: who is responsible to get what product, who is responsible to keep track of all the transactions in the group, and so on. For the Hostage Rescue stage, report each step of your negotiation, what argument types you use, and why, and so on.

In addition, you may also document how you exchange information, how you accept, modify, counter-offer a deal, how you plan your 1-to-many negotiations, how you conduct sequential, many 1-to-1 negotiations, how many iterations required to complete a negotiation (failure or success), your net utility gained for each round, the amount of money left and total number of problems solved or partially solved, your observation of other student groups during the negotiation process (can you figure out what they are doing?), and so on. Finally, you must conclude.

Your participation on Negotiation Day will be graded based on:

50% Report

50% Negotiations

The negotiations will be graded based on your in-class participation on Negotiation Day, and on your group’s performance.

References

Faratin, P., C. Sierra, and N. R. Jennings (1998). Negotiation Decision Functions for Autonomous Agents, International Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 24(3-4):159-182.

Kraus, S., K. Sycara, and A. Evenchik (1998). Reaching Agreements through Argumentation: A Logical Model and Implementation, Artificial Intelligence Journal, 104(1-2):1-69.